The Seven Tragedies of Taylor Hebert
by Niether
Summary: Taylor's mother lived, and she has her sisters who would never betray her. Even still, Taylor's life was never marked for a happy ending. Everything has its price, even if you never agreed to pay.


The first tragedy happened when Taylor was only five years old. She and her father were traveling down the boardwalk. Danny had gotten a day off from his job and had decided to spend it with his daughter. He'd invited Annette, but she'd had work to do, some details in the handouts that needed to be rewritten that she'd only noticed a half week before the course was scheduled to begin.

So Danny and Taylor were alone together, walking the street, eating ice cream and tourist watching. The day was bright and cloudless and it was on days like these that Taylor had the remarkably mature thought that she was the luckiest girl alive. As mature as it may have been, it was also depressingly ironic.

It happened on their way home. It wasn't special, or spectacular, or even all that unique. One moment they were walking together, giggling like they had shared a secret between just the two of them, the next there was a shout and the crack of gunfire. Danny pushed her, screaming at her to run, and she had always been a good girl for daddy. She ran and ran and ran, and when she looked back her father was nowhere to be seen.

She didn't know what else to do, so she ran back home in tears, wailing and sobbing into her mother's arms. Annette was shaken, but not worried. She'd known Danny long enough to know there was a reason he'd found himself leader of a local union. He cared, and he was smart, and he knew how to pick his battles. That didn't stop her from searching the streets after he'd failed to return after Annette had put Taylor to sleep.

She found nothing, and didn't know what'd happened to him until the next day when she saw it on the news. A clash between the Empire Eighty-Eight and one of the myriad asian gangs that had been popping up in the last few years.

Annette was devastated, but she was strong and she'd run with a gang before and knew from hard experience that sometimes these things just happened. Taylor had no such experience. She was only five. It wasn't until the funeral that Taylor understood that her father was never coming home again.

She was inconsolable, and Annette didn't know what to do. Danny had always been such a natural with Taylor, Annette felt like she could never understand their daughter like he had. Naturally Annette's parents offered to come live with them. They absolutely adored little Taylor and had only ever really had an issue with Danny. Annette politely but firmly declined.

The second tragedy happened a few years later. Taylor had yet to recover on her own, and Annette didn't think this was any way to live her life. There had to be something she could do to take Taylor's mind off things, to help her move on.

Annette tried introducing Taylor to her favorite novels, but Taylor shrugged off her attempts with the bare lack of tact only a child could pull off. Danny had grown to mythic proportions in Taylor's mind in the last few years, his back broad and god-like as he stood silhouetted against the horizon of her mind.

The stories that Kurt and Lacey, friends from Danny's workplace, told only cemented the view in Taylor's mind. Annette wished they'd stop coming over, stop reminding her of how wonderful her dead husband had been, but she couldn't turn them away. Not when Taylor adored them. That, and the stories were a sweet kind of sorrow for Annette, which was so poetic she couldn't bring herself to hate the pain they brought.

When Annette saw an ad in the paper for a Sailing Camp, a week long affair that would teach children the basics of the sea, she felt as if she'd struck gold. Maybe it wasn't a perfect fit, maybe it was a thinly veiled attempt to get some alone time, and maybe Annette hadn't been in the best of headspaces recently, but that didn't stop the fact that Taylor was packed up and riding a bus down the coast early Monday morning.

In the end Taylor really did have a good time, but what happened to her was much less important than what happened to Annette.

That very next Tuesday, she was returning home from a lovely afternoon out in town with her old friend, Zoe. They hadn't really been in touch recently, but Annette was hoping to rekindle friendships. They'd both had to keep an eye on Zoe's own daughter, a darling thing about Taylor's age, since Zoe's husband had been called to work suddenly.

The two women had struck up a conversation with another young mother who looked like she'd just been grocery shopping. She hadn't been shopping, per se, but groceries had been acquired and pride had been swallowed. The three were earnestly having a good time and the girls were playing in the aisle when the bus lurched, throwing Annette over the children.

Never a passive one, she made her way to the front, ostensibly to find why their journey had been halted. She herself halted as the cause was made apparent. A burning, metal man, tall as the bus. She didn't scream, Annette felt it was better to leave such duties to the experts. Instead she ran as fast as she could to the emergency exit in the back.

She saw that the two girls had wandered forward, likely to investigate as she had. Annette didn't have time to dwell on it as the bus was lifted, _lifted_ , by the burning man. She barely snatched the suddenly screaming girls as they fell to the front. There was a jerk, a flash of pain, and Annette found herself on the road surrounded by glass.

She didn't see as the burning man threw the bus. She didn't watch as it hit a local hero and bloom into a fireball. She didn't know that the rest of the recently deceased hero's team had made a tactical retreat. She felt when the burning man stood over her though. The smell of molten metal stuck to her throat and burned the back of her nostrils.

She looked up as he looked down on her and her charges, in fact the only living souls on the street besides the burning man himself. He'd noted this deficiency and was taking slow, methodical action to correct it when Annette shouted,

"No! You mustn't hurt them!"

Lung halted his massive hand. He was not used to anyone even trying to give him orders, and that her voice nagged at a long buried memory of softer times only irritated him more. He curled his hand into a fist and touched it to the ground, leaning to look into the eyes of this impertinent, soon to be mortally impaired woman.

"What," He asked, smoke spilling from his mouth. "could you possibly say? What promise? What threat? What could you offer me that I could not simply take?"

The burning man's voice was like crushed coals and his accent was thick enough that Annette felt guilty for noticing it. She'd always assumed she was a forward thinking woman, but with his words hanging in the air she found herself feeling rather like a damsel in distress, perhaps the most distressing bit being that she knew her knight couldn't come to rescue her.

What could she say? What could she offer? The man was moving again, perhaps thinking his question had been rhetorical. So, children clutched to her chest and panic clouding her mind she blurted out the first thing she could think of.

"My eyes! I'll trade you my eyes for our lives!"

Lung blinked and looked at the proffered offering. They were clear and blue and sat behind thick lenses. Lung growled. He did not need damaged eyes. Then it occurred to him, in a purely practical sense, he didn't need any extra eyes at all. He'd never been one for the aesthetic. He and Annette however were much more alike than they knew, for in the depths of his heart he was a hopeless romantic. It was against his nature to decline such a poetic request.

So he didn't.

It was something of a surprise for her students when she came in the next week sporting two eye-patches, but never let it be said that Annette Hebert couldn't roll with the punches. The shock was just a little worse for Taylor, who just about fell over from the sight of it. That she now had two new, seemingly mute, sisters was all that kept her from caving into herself like she had after losing her father.

Emma and Sophia were their names. Sophia didn't have a father, Emma's father had been a victim of the initial struggle with the burning man, Lung, and both their mothers had perished with the bus. No one came forward to claim them, so Annette did. Just the sight of them melted her heart.

Taylor had a tough start of it, but soon came to love her sisters. In those first few months Annette hovered and fussed over them to the point of exception. Taylor couldn't help feeling jealous. The college Annette worked at forced her into a period of leave after trying to separate her entirely. It seemed obvious to them that one couldn't lecture on literature if one was unable to read. But Annette was stubborn, and they couldn't keep her away forever.

The day came that Annette sat with her girls at the bus stop and waved as they left for school. It rankled that she was forced to ride the bus, but Taylor didn't say anything as her sisters clutched at her mother's skirts and wailed. She wasn't a crybaby like them. She settled far in the back, close enough to the window to feel the chill of the early morning dew.

Of course her sisters followed, timid and afraid.

The seats where only meant for two, but the girls were all young and scrawny and determined to fit. Except for Taylor, but being in the window seat meant she had little to say about the order of things.

Sophia, who had piled in right after her, gave her a look. A glance at Emma, the sheen of unspilt tears in her eyes, made up Sophia's young mind. She remembered what happened to her mommy, her first one. She'd vowed she would grow up to be a hero who fought dragons and saved damsels in distress and there wouldn't be anymore little girls crying themselves to sleep.

Not necessarily in that order. The journey to herohood started with baby steps, after all. So, with a measure of determination, Sophia climbed onto Taylor's lap. On a fundamental level, this didn't bother Taylor, not really. She'd always being a friendly girl who always appreciated hugs even from strangers, which her father had been sure to put a stop to before the bastard even got close.

On a more surface level, though, this bothered Taylor a whole lot. She didn't want to be touched. She didn't want to be hugged. She most definitely didn't want this little girl getting comfortable enough to just chill on her lap. Taylor was in fact more than ready to shove Sophia back to her seat and, if Emma wasn't such a great catcher, into the aisle.

It turned out to be unnecessary. Sophia had no intention to simply sit on Taylor's lap. She was much too young to enjoy such things. No, The Lap was simply a means to an end, a pitstop on a journey, the (metaphorical) void that separated the great Stars and Nebulae. With the slightest grunt of effort, and a marginally louder grunt of discomfort from Taylor, Sophia had moved on and had wedged herself between Taylor and the window.

This was not comfortable for Sophia. This was not comfortable for Taylor. Emma took the opportunity to squeeze in tighter with glee. Taylor felt something like a sardine who had been unlucky enough to be packed with its upstairs neighbor, the one who blasts their music at two in the morning and always smells vaguely of cheese.

Neither Sophia nor Emma smelled of cheese. They smelled like strawberries, just like Taylor. There was, after all, only one bottle of shampoo in the house. As a matter of pure coincidence, that meant they also smelled like Annette. Taylor decided she wouldn't bother being angry.

Even if she preferred the scent of peaches.

The third tragedy happened when Sophia was thirteen years old. She'd thrown herself into track and field. The short, vicious nature of the sprints did wonders, venting the ugly feelings that had begun to crop up in her heart. Of course this meant she stayed quite a bit after school, and on that same token traveled home alone, seeing as Taylor preferred her charts and models, and Emma had taken to baking confections of all sorts. It was hard on the budget and on the waistline, and were Annette a better mother she would have curtailed the hobby. But she was a weak, weak woman with a sweet tooth.

The night it happened, Taylor was with her though. She'd finally gotten curious enough to hang around, just to see what javelin was actually like. Less impressive than she'd hoped, but you could only expect so much from middle schoolers surrounded by meddling adults that refused to let natural selection take its course.

The two walked home. They didn't even think twice about it, not with Sophia. She didn't much like buses. They wandered home, doing their best to avoid gangers and crackheads. There was only so much one could do in a city like Brockton Bay, but they were doing it. The mistake wasn't using common streets, it was neglecting to ensure there was anyone else there besides themselves. Then suddenly there was.

Three big men. They were dirty, tired, experiencing withdrawals, and in the mood to make decisions that everyone involved would regret. They took one look at Sophia and fell upon Taylor. She'd always looked mature for her age, and with Emma's need for a taste-tester, she'd taken on something of a rounded figure. Sophia? She did track. The calories were gone as soon as they were ingested.

Sophia stood dumbfounded for a second. The men had completely ignored her, like she wasn't even there. She vaguely heard Taylor's muffled screams, but they were mostly drowned out by the rush of blood pounding her eardrums.

She was snapped out of her daze by the sight of piece of cloth, fluttering from where it had been thrown. Blue. Taylor screamed again. Sophia sprung at the men like she'd shot from a rifle. But there were three of them, and she was only a young girl. One held her back while the other two finished undoing their buckles.

Sophia bit and kicked and clawed, but the man held her all the tighter. A quick jab to the gut ensured she didn't have any breath to struggle with. She had to get loose. She had to save Taylor. She wished she was stronger. She wished she was faster. She wished she could _do something_.

"Don't worry girly," The man holding her said in her ear, his breath making her choke. " **I** ain't t-too picky. Give me boys a minute, then _we_ c-c-can have some fun."

In that dark, ugly second, Sophia wished she could _make them all just disappear_.

Sophia started, like she'd woken from a dream, except she was still in this nightmare. But she was free. She'd fallen from the man's arms and she knew on a visceral, beastial level that he wouldn't be bothering her again. She ran to the men who were holding Taylor down, and all it took was a touch and first one, then the other were turned to mist and scattered in the wind.

Sophia stood there, panting like she'd run a marathon and for a second her heart plummeted to her stomach because Taylor wasn't moving. Then there was a twitch, a shudder, a hitched breath, then a sob, the kind that broke hearts and started wars. Sophia breathed out, a wave of relief flooding over her that made it altogether too easy to forget something important.

In that moment of relaxation, the three men who hadn't quite disappeared, only changed shape a little, were suddenly snapped back to the way they were. Only their pieces were a little out of order, which, as any first year medical student could identify with a few hints, was something of a problem when one was expecting a fully functional body.

The street they were in, conspicuously devoid of pedestrians, was filled with gore and the walls were painted with blood. Sophia found she didn't much care, except in the way one cared when they cracked open a few eggs to make an omelette. Sophia was more occupied searching for clothes, studiously ignoring what Taylor was retching.

It wasn't long before there was footsteps, heavy and clanking. She turned and saw Armsmaster walk down the street. He'd arrived so fast. He'd come too late. She couldn't see his eyes, but she knew that he was examining the bodies, that he saw how they were torn in ways no normal human could manage.

Taylor looked to see. Her face went first pale, then crimson red.

"No!" She screamed, turning away and covering herself. Sophia was between them in an instant, shoving her suddenly very threatening hands towards Armsmaster. She hoped he wouldn't come any closer. She hoped she could do the thing she had before if he did.

But Armsmaster arrested his movement. Behind his mask his eyes were sharp and calculating, taking everything in. The broken bodies of the addicts, the depressingly uniform variety of fluids washing the ground, the trembling girl covered in marks and welts, the trembling girl covered in blood.

He wasn't stupid. He'd seen more Trigger Events than even he knew was healthy. He quietly reported back to the Monitor, requesting either Miss Militia's or Battery's immediate aid. In the meantime, he kept his distance. Even so far from him, they looked so small. So fragile. It wasn't his first time in a situation almost exactly like this, by any mean, and it was moments like these he wished he could wrap every last child up in armor. He gripped his hand into a fist, but there was nowhere to point his anger. The rapists were already dead.

"What are your names?" He asked. Sophia flinching at the sound and Taylor outright jumping. Sophia swallowed thickly. She'd reached one hand back to Taylor, who was clutching it like her life depended on it. Sophia could feel every shake, every shuddered breath she took.

She looked again at Armsmaster. A monolith, a colossus set in stark relief by the setting sun. She saw him standing there in his gleaming armor with his puffed out chest, like he had something to be proud of. Her eyes narrowed into a murderous glare.

"You," Yu? A strange name for a black girl, but- "You were too late!"

Oh.

Armsmaster kept his face stony. He couldn't afford to tremble. Couldn't afford to frown, and he looked all the more inhuman for it. He glanced at a display inside his mask. Battery was still three minutes away. He wasn't sure what to say, so he simply said, "Yes."

Sophia face twisted into something ugly. He'd said it so- So factually. So blithely. Yes, the sky is blue. Yes, water is wet. Yes, I failed to save your sister. She clenched her hand and something black arced between her knuckles. She made to lunge at him in a fit of anger, but jerked back. Taylor was still holding her hand tight. Armsmaster was thankful. Traumatized or no, it was not Protectorate policy to let a parahuman attack with impunity.

"Yes." He said again, letting just a little emotion into his voice despite his better judgement. "I was too late."

Then Battery arrived. She gasped at the sight and rushed to the girls, working her magic the way Armsmaster could never understand. Why could Battery connect in just an instant? Why was she accepted and he reviled? Why was he so damn useless?

He turned to leave, already pulling up the appropriate forms he would need to fill out on the HUD in his mask. Not even Monitor heard when he said under his breath, "I hate this damn city."

Armsmaster doesn't drink. Even when he desperately wanted to forget what had happened in a day, he'd found that there were other, more productive ways to take his mind off things. If he wanted to be alone, where no one could find him? Less options, but options nonetheless. Only his closest coworkers knew where to look for him during times like these.

Which was why it was several hours later, after Miss Militia had returned from her own patrol, that she found him in the elevator shaft, working on the hydraulics system. She pulled herself up onto the top of the car and let her legs dangle out the access panel.

She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

"I was too late." Too late, too late, too late. The girl's voice had been swirling in his mind since he'd gotten back to the rig. "I was too slow and couldn't do anything to save them, or even help them. I just stood there like an idiot, waiting for Battery to bail me out. I, I just-"

Armsmaster didn't slam his tool. He was much too conscientious of his budget to do something like that. He very deliberately placed it back in it's kit.

"I hate this city, Hannah. I hate the gangs, and the violence. I hate that I have to build suits and weapons, I hate that they're _never_ good enough. Hannah, I want to hurt them."

Miss Militia, Hannah to her friends, listened silently, taking everything in and keeping it where it'll never be forgotten. Armsmaster knew, but a woman who remembers everything has to be good at keeping secrets.

"It wouldn't be hard, either. I've thought up the designs, and all it would take is a few automated suits, I could scavenge the pieces from all those prototypes I built in Oh Six. Install some jets and flamethrowers, and I could wipe them out. First the Merchants," He spit the name like a curse. "then the Empire, then-"

"Lung?"

Armsmaster paused. He said nothing for a minute before replying, "No, no I suppose you're right. I, god, what was I even thinking? You can't just…" Armsmaster trailed off.

The pair sat there like that for a while, Armsmaster, Colin, thinking and Hannah just breathing. Colin had dropped his hand from his lap, and every few seconds Hannah would inch her own hand just a little closer. She placed just the tips over his. He sighed loudly and she froze.

"Hannah, what can I do?" He asked. He sounded tired and hurt, like whenever they came back from an especially bad Endbringer fight, in as much as such a battle might be 'good'.

"I put on my armor. I ride on patrol. I put away criminals, and it's _still_ not enough. I can't even save two girls from a bunch of thugs."

Hannah's hand crept further up. She curled her fingers into his and he didn't stop her.

"Colin, you know about my Trigger Event, right?"

"Yes."

"It wasn't a cape or a gang that did that to me. They were just people, doing what they thought was right. They were the worst kind of evil, but they _thought_ what they were doing, how they were fighting, was right and good. And that's just it. The world will always be full of people who think doing as they please because they have the strength to is right and good."

"So what do we do?" Colin asked. "If we killed the Endbringers and threw all the gangs into the Birdcage, the streets still wouldn't be safe. What's even the point?"

Hannah frowned. She hated when Colin got like this. "I lost friends that day."

Colin snapped his mouth shut.

"I've never forgotten them. Not their names, not their faces, not how they laughed when we played. I can't. So I respect them, and I do what I can to make sure that they didn't die for nothing. _I_ lived. _I_ can still fight for truth, justice-"

"-And the American Way." Colin finished, smiling at the memory of watching tv with the rest of the original Wards. Hannah smiled too.

"Don't forget what it's all about. Hundreds of people owe you their lives, not to mention their livelihoods. We do what we can _because_ we can. So do the best you can."

Colin nodded slowly. Simple goals were better, not so easily muddled. Do the best he can. Where? For who? Colin already knew.


End file.
